Software You Can Use

ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update

Three weeks ago we held our MIX 2011 conference in Las Vegas. MIX is one of my favorite events of the year, and the conference always has a ton of great content and announcements. all of the keynotes and breakout sessions from the event can be watched online for free here. I’ll be doing a few posts in the upcoming weeks that also cover some highlights from it.

ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update

One of the announcements I made in my Day 1 keynote was the release of an ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update. this update is a small, but very tasty, update that includes a bunch of really nice tooling improvements for ASP.NET MVC 3. You can install it from the http://asp.net/mvc site (just click the installer).

The ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update can be installed on top of the original ASP.NET MVC 3 release (no need to uninstall it if you already have it installed) or just installed directly on a clean machine (there is no need to have the original ASP.NET MVC 3 bits already installed).

The ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools update only includes Visual Studio tooling improvements and default project template changes – it does not include any changes to the ASP.NET MVC 3 runtime binaries. Because it uses the same ASP.NET MVC 3 runtime binaries as our original January release, there is no need to update existing MVC 3 projects you are working on or make any code changes to them.

The final release of EF 4.1 (which includes EF Code First) is now included by default with all new projects. Previously you had to download this library separately or get it using NuGet. now it is referenced by default when you create new projects (enabling a really clean, powerful data API out of the box).

Built-in data scaffolding support is now supported with the Add->Controller dialog within Visual Studio. this enables you to automatically scaffold a Controller class (which includes all the necessary data access code) and all of the view templates required to implement a CRUD solution against an EF model class (using either code-first, database-first or model-first). it makes it super easy to quickly create a data driven site using ASP.NET MVC.

New HTML5 project templates are included that make it easy to use HTML5 semantic markup when creating new sites (meaning elements like <header>, <footer>, <section>, <aside>, etc). We also now include the Modernizr 1.7 JavaScript library with new projects. Modernizr is a cool OSS library that makes it easy to check for HTML5 capabilities within browsers, and also allows you to use standard CSS to style HTML5 semantic elements and still have the styling work on older browsers (like IE6).

A new Intranet Project Template has been included with this release that makes it easy to create a new project that uses Windows authentication to identify users (as opposed to the Forms Authentication pages built-into the Internet template today). Speaking of the Internet Project Template, the AccountController class within it has also been cleaned up with this release.

Newer versions of jQuery core, jQuery UI and jQuery Validation are included with this release. The default versions added to new projects are also now added as NuGet libraries (meaning they are listed in the packages.config file of the project) – which means that you can use NuGet to easily update them to even more recent versions as a later date.

I’m going to do several blog posts in the days and weeks ahead that cover the above features and how to take advantage of them. You can also learn more about the release (and see it in action) from the following posts/videos: